A Conversation with the monasery

Its amazing how time passes at the Monastery. Like no other place I have experienced, at the monastery, I get to finally catch up with time. As we all know, time is somewhat like God. You cannot see it. You cannot touch time. But we know that time impacts us, and we know that God impacts us. Typically, I try to take advantage of time, and mark time by various doctors appointments and school outings, or meetings. Because the time that I keep is so chaotic, and because it is not rounded by any other "greater rhythm," time becomes controlled in the palm of my hand. It is so bloody frustrating, difficult, and impossible. Half of the time, I see people that are worn plum out, just because they have no breather from their time keeping. Time rules them. Ironically though, the time that keeps them is a sort of 9 to 5 type of cliche. We know that moment when we met time, and it became eternal, and it evaporated before our eyes. We know. And this moment in time, this "mystery of time" becomes freshly clear in the moments when adventure down to Moncks Corner, South Carolina. I always need a dose of reality. I always need a nice dose of time.

I realize in going there that I often am trying to make a name for myself inside of the confines of time. I want to be the big noise. I want to be praised, and lauded. All of these efforts often mingle inside of the bubble of time. I will meet someone at Starbucks and I will take one hour to share a story, or listen to a wound. In the meeting for one hour, at Starbucks, I will often times forget that I am spending eternity with this person. Now if I have another appointment just at the other end of our hour, I will certainly begin to manipulate the time. If the time is half over, I may start to think of topics that will justifiably end by the next twenty minutes. I have realized something. I Raleigh, I often live inside the wrong story of time. I live in my own aweful head of time. Instead, I need to read the writing on the wall. I need to read the writing in the Bible. The long story of the Bible allows for greater ease, and its more completed view of time allows for greater depth of experience. Because time is ordered, time becomes filled with greater clarity and purpose and meaning.

After all, time is magical. It is like ferry dust. If the ordered time of the monastery, or the ordered time of the gospels, gets into your bones, you are in for some good change. Once God re-orders time, to His divine mandates, that dangerous and all encomassing love of the ferry dust will come out and get you. It will leap on you like a hound. And so the trick is to get into that space of the monastery, and just allow that space to pressure you into a corner. The corner of the monastery is the silence of God. Once in that hard corner, I no longer can assume that I am the master of my destiny. I have to let go. This is where conversion happens.

When I go to Mepkin, God sprinkles his ferry dust of love all over me, and He just doesnt stop. He takes me into the dessert, He takes me into His silence, and he shows me that I am frail, weak, dependent, and hopelessly dependent on His time, his structures, and His world. I inhabit His world, and not the other way around. Whatever this world is, and I have not figured that one out yet, it is not my world. It is God's world. It is another persons creation. It must be. Otherwise, why in the Sam Hill would I enjoy it so much. I know it sounds quite feminine to speak of ferry dust, but I must admit, after reading 30 books aloud to my daughter about Ferries, I think it is starting to get into the unconscious mind.

But to get back to this idea of gnostic spirituality of the West, I believe we must see how much we have become so infatuated with our own personal experience with Jesus, or our own personal pigrimage to God. Well, the good thing about a monastery is that it reveals that there is so much more than you. Wow. It does it VIVIDLY, in living color, in a way that the world cannot do. It does it in four ways.

1) It reminds you that you are not the center of your own journey through the Preached Word of God.

2) It reminds you that you are not the center of your own journey through the read Word of God

3) It reminds you that you are not the center of your own journey through the arduous experience of prayer

4) It reminds me that I am not the center of my own journey through the Sacrament of the Lords Supper.

These 4 modes of JOY allow me to glimpse the true heart of Christ, and they show me that my heart is so unlike His heart. My heart is so dark, and His is so light. Outside of the monastery, the meaning in my life is driven by material objects and my personal meaning becomes driven by material possessions. I can see it in my own heart. I long to have a larger house. I long to have a BMW. But these possiessions do not give me a deeper meaning. Rather, they leave me without any connection to the fear of the Lord. But if you are enveloped in His praying community, there is no way around getting pounced on by His love.

Because all things eventually become relative in the gnostic worldview, there is not actual room for the challange of making eggs in the morning. Getting up to pray at 3:30 makes no sense to a man that has no sense of the holiness of the Lord, the otherness of God, nor the fear of the Lord. Questions such as, "If a tree falls in the woods, and there is nobody in the woods, does it make a sound?" are never asked in the Monastery. Well, this is the wrong question, and the ordered life of the monastery exposes the frailty of this question. First of all, noise has nothing to do with the human ear. Noise comes from vibrations between two objects, even one object. Any 4 year old drummer can tell you that.

Second of all, it is probably a good thing there wasn't a person in the woods to hear the tree because then we can be assured that nobody got hurt. In the monastery, there is order. In the cosmos of God, there is order, profound order. But in the gnostic mind, everything that is perfect exists outside the confines of the human body, outside of the mind, in a sort of disembodied existence on a planet. The gnostic tries to attain salvation through general "knowledge." Knowing general things, like the fact that there is death and life, like knowing that there is dark and light, ultimately saves you. The writing of Deepak Chopra is a good example of gnosticism. It sounds so good. It sounds groovy and hip, and it gives the human person all the freedom in the world to fine tune their own universe. There in lies the problem. And now that I am done with my rant, I just will end it hear, in the middle of the woods. I dont need to make a tidy proclimation. I dont need to get my theological window clear. No. I am sufficiently relying on Gods grace to cover me in my weakness. For as Paul says in II Corinthians, "My grace is sufficient...my power is made perfect in your weakness."